When the term education” or educational” is used it can conjure archetypal images of some 1940’s classroom with a boring old lady in the front, droning on about Homer, while her uniformed students fall asleep on their wooden desks. At the same time it has tried to reveal problems with the ways in which these different accounts have been driven in part by various agendas to define a scope and boundary for the field, and often to privilege one or another approach to philosophy of education, even when they have endeavored to be comprehensive and fair to all views.

To cite one example that is prominent in the literature in North America at least, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling (Wisconsin v. Yoder) in which members of the Amish sect were allowed to withdraw their children from public schools after the eighth grade—for, it had been argued, any deeper …